In Pt. 2 of our LiB interviews, we talk to Illicitor as they also get ready to come out guns blazing for a slay fest at the LiB local showcase. I went down to the guy’s sweaty practice space at singer/guitarist Bob Gates’s home garage on a Monday night. I was stoked to meet with them, as they made quite a lasting impression on me when they played with New Orlean punks Pears at the Beauty Bar last month.
Together, Bob Gates [vocals/guitar], Zabi Naqshband [bass/vocals], and Micah Malcolm [drums] have unlocked a formula to create catchy yet sludgy tunes that are just downright awesome. We talked about getting ready for LiB with last-minute notice, how the band formed, how they’ve managed to keep things refreshing after years of playing music, and about almost getting arrested while on tour.
Did the Life is Beautiful event organizer’s decision to add a last minute local showcase catch you guys by surprise?
Zabi: Well, they announced it kinda last-minute but, yeah, according to all the other stuff they had going on, half of me is saying that they’re like…throwing everyone a bone. I think that maybe they just got something last-minute, or maybe they forgot about Container Park, adding it to the mix. It’s not like adding the local bands, like one or two acts, is gonna make people go, “oh, okay, now I’m gonna go spend the $300.”
Bob: What is cool though is that if someone chooses our link to buy a ticket, we get money for that. So it’s a way for us to get a little bit of money. But that’s a unicorn. It’s hard enough to get someone to pay $5 or $10 to see you play, now make that $100, to see one show, to see us play at six o’clock.
Zabi: And it’s the nature of how people are as well. I have a whole bunch of people hit me up and be like, “dude, congratulations on that. Hey, you get any free tickets?” That was the consensus I got.
Have event organizers been cool?
Zabi: They’ve been pretty cool so far. I was really surprised that they were so cool with us playing at Life is Shit, which is that same night.
Bob: I don’t necessarily want to say it’s like an olive branch, but it’s a little bit of them conceding that they’re not gonna get rid of it [the Life is Shit festival]. You called your festival Life is Beautiful. It’s a phrase that has been used in irony to talk about how shitty things are, you know what I mean? That’s a natural thing that you should be aware of as a corporation, if you’re gonna fucking focus group and do all that sort of thing.
Zabi: And then also at the same time, steal a logo from somebody. And then also at the same time just be real big-headed about it. In Vegas, you go from being nobody to somebody over night, here. I’m not saying nobody knew who the dude was that runs it, but now he’s like, a household name in the Downtown music scene. Everyone knows Rehan [Chourdhry, Life is Beautiful head honcho].
Bob: Ultimately, we don’t care about any of the politics surrounding either festival [Life is Beautiful and Life is Shit], we just want a chance to play for people we’ve never played for before, which both festivals are going to do for us. Chances are, the folks at LIB aren’t going to LIS and vice versa, so why not play for both?
Let’s get into some history. How did Illicitor come to be?
Zabi: It started from another band called Holding Onto Sound. I was in the band the whole ten years, and then Bob joined up two years before we broke up. HOTS was a three-piece, trying to expand our sound and we had the idea to get Bob in the band. In two years we did our third album with Bob and our 7″ with Bob. That band broke up so the rest of us in the band, the original drummer [Vanessa Tidwell], Bob, and I decided to start a new band. It took us a couple of months to just get over the shock and get back in a room and jam.
Then we had this plan where we kept it a secret, we didn’t tell anybody that we were jamming. People were asking, and they obviously wanted to know what happened, but we weren’t very detailed. We were very vague about it. Out of respect we were trying not to turn anyone into a villain, although they deserved that.
Why the secrecy over starting Illicitor?
Zabi: The way I interpreted it, some people were pretty bummed that [Holding Onto Sound] broke up. I was bummed too, but it made me feel uncomfortable. I don’t know. I’m trying to be as humble as possible not to say the band was something special, but there were people that cared. It was hard to explain what was going on, and then it took [Illicitor] almost a year to play a show. We just thought it would be fun to keep it a secret. We did it because it was fun, and goofy, and silly. I thought it would be better to have control about someone hearing your name for the first time and then seeing you play immediately after, so there was already a face to the name.
Then Vanessa [original Illicitor drummer] quit the band immediately after that first show. Which was a huge bummer because we were starting to really click with these songs. Bob and I are both pretty self-conscious about these songs, neither of us have had the job of being a primary songwriter.
So how do Illicitor songs get made?
Zabi: We come up with songs on our own and then we show each other. What we think of in our heads when it first starts out, it’s like that – but on steroids.
Bob: At the very least we usually, especially me, will get a couple parts together and then kinda mold the song the way we think it’s suppose to go.
Zabi: I wait to show Micah. Seriously, I use him as my template. If I see him get excited about something I’m like, “oh my, I’m going back to that shit.” Because, he has ideas that are really good and it’s such a good feeling to get criticism and not piss you off.
Micah, do you think that comes from the fact that you play with several bands in town?
Micah: I think so, just having so much experience with a lot of different people. Illicitor, Quitters, and New Cold War are the ones that I play with the most, but I play with a lot of different people. I’ve covered for Dirty Panties, Betting On Tomorrow when they were a band, that was like the old Surrounded by Thieves and Franks and Deans guys. I just like doing different experiments of different mixtures. With that, I can kinda bring my experience from all these different people because I hear so many different songs. Like, “I know this won’t work because we tried this in another band and it’s too long or it’s too big,” or something like that. If it’s something that I believe I’m doing a lot or someone in the band is doing a lot, one of us usually picks up on it and is like, “alright, we’ve done that.”
How do you guys try to keep the songs new and refreshing?
Bob: It’s like a self-filter. Before it ever gets to them I’m like, “no we already do that.” In order for me to feel comfortable showing a song to them I feel like it has to hit a certain bar. If I feel that I’m rehashing old ideas I won’t even bring it to the table. Generally, I like to set the bar high for myself that way just coming in I’m like, “alright cool, I feel good about it.”
Zabi: We usually pick up on a song really fast and there’s always just little sections in the middle that we have to edit and decide how to do it.
Micah: We’re really good at laying down the base of the song really quickly. We just have to tweek it to not make it sound so repetitive.
Bob: As a songwriter, the whole song itself is what you’re going for. You want the chords and chord progression to have a certain feel. But, as a band, you get to a point where it’s like, how do you put your stamp on that song as a band? That’s where you work on the phrasing or the timing.
What would be Illicitor’s stamp?
Zabi: Aw, man, I don’t know if we know yet.
Micah: I think that for all of us, this is probably the heaviest thing that we’ve been a part of, as far as a consistent mood of songs.
Zabi: We’re not the heaviest band you’ve ever heard, but were playing the heaviest we’ve ever played. Every time we come up with something, my number one is: heavy. If someone says that we sound really dark, we’re like, “yeah that’s cool!” It’s really heavy, it’s really dark, we throw these things into a blender. But, I don’t know, man. I still don’t have a single direction or a single idea of what we sound like, and I’m glad. I am so glad we haven’t figured it out yet, because I don’t wanna tie us into this one kind of genre. We write a song and then we start fresh; a new blank piece of paper. The next song could literally be anything.
Micah: Yeah, I would say that we really don’t have a specific thing that we’re going for. Whenever different songs are brought to the table, it’s not like, “we need to make it that way, that way, that way.” We kinda let it breathe, we see where it goes.
Zabi: And if there are parts that excite us, we’re like, “yeah let’s elaborate more on whatever that is.”
Bob: I think the heaviness just comes naturally from the three of us. You know, a good handful of the songs that we play currently were written with Vanessa. So, with Micah being in it, it just feels like Micah naturally took us to a spot where we were a little bit faster and heavier.
How did the band change adding in Micah when Vanessa decided to leave?
Zabi: I’ve listened to the songs with Vanessa that I have recorded on my phone and the songs that Micah plays. Dude, I don’t know if I could pick a…if I’m putting it in car terms, it’s like the songs with Vanessa were in fourth gear and now they’re in fifth gear. Vanessa was fast, but not so fast. She still knew how to really chill and kinda jam out.
Micah: Vanessa’s got such a good groove. Better than probably anybody in town. She just knew how to lay back with something and let it “cook.” That’s one thing I always remembered about Holding onto Sound, that these guys could not stand still.
Zabi: When we asked Micah, I couldn’t imagine another person. I was telling Bob, the scariest thing was Micah saying no. I love the way Micah plays drums!
Micah, how did Zabi and Bob approach you to play with them?
Micah: That was one of the best calls that I ever got. Ever. Holding onto Sound was my favorite band in town. So when the people that you respect so much give you a call and they’re like, “hey man, you know, we really want you to play with us.” I was so flattered and honored. It was amazing.
Micah, I know you also teach drumming lessons to anyone wanting to learn. How does that feel seeing someone progress because of your help? Is there such a thing as a drum recital?
Micah: I actually just had a lesson with Brian from Bee Master last Thursday, and that was really cool. Yeah, it’s really cool to see a kid make progress, and it’s because of your doing. When I was younger I took lessons with a guy from the church I was going to. He taught a few kids and he was able to throw a drum show at the church. He would have us listen to a song through headphones and then play the song we were listening to. We were the only ones with the music playing in our ears, so they just heard us playing the drums, they didn’t hear us playing along to a song.
I know you guys are recording an album at 11st Street. How long have you been at that, and is that gonna be self-released?
Zabi: We’ve recorded there like three times. In June and maybe late May. The plan is to do the smart thing and send it to people that we’ve kept in contact with. People we’ve chatted with and don’t feel out of place sending our things to.
Bob: I think if anything it’ll probably be like a joint GC Records and National Southwestern thing.
Zabi: Yeah, because Ronald’s been really doing us a solid and helping us out. We’ve talked about it, and he’s still in the beginning phases of that place. He’s doing a great job, I think. That places looks great.
Micah: Dude, they’re getting so much good press.
Zabi: The live sessions that they just got with Spotify, that’s huge. Ronald knows what he’s doing and I think people are picking up on it. Those kinds of things usually miss Vegas a lot, and now because I think that there’s kind of a renaissance, it does take a lot of funding to do this stuff these days. People talk about the Bunkhouse closing like it’s a big deal. You know how many times the biggest, most promising venues close? The Funhouse just closed in Seattle. They talk about Bunkhouse like everyone’s just going to the funeral, it’s like look – this is business man. This is how shit happens. They had a great run when they had it.
Has Illicitor played out of state gigs?
Zabi: We went out of state with The Quitters, which was by far one of the most fun things we’ve ever done. To think that at 31 I could go out of town for a weekend show, it was totally sick. It got scary toward the end, with the police, and the pulling over.
Micah: That was crazy.
What happened there?
Micah: It was like three in the morning.
Bob: It was 4/20 and we were all like, “4/20 man! Let’s pull over here!”
Zabi: So we pull over, we smoke, we talk about things and we chill. We see these lights out in the distance and it looks like construction lights. We all talked about it, we all speculated.
Bob: Brock [Frabbiele] was there and totally told us they were cops and we didn’t listen. So the moral of the story is, listen to Brock.
Micah: They had the lights on and they came to the van and they were like, “hey, what’s going on here?” We’re like, “we all just pulling over to have a quick stretch, we’re all kind of tired, we wanna make sure better safe than sorry.” He said, “well okay now, drive careful” and just walked away. There’s no fucking way he didn’t smell pot on all of us.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, guys! Illictor play Life is Beautiful’s local showcase in Container Park at 6:20 p.m. on 9/25.
-Alan Madrigal
Illicitor photos by Emily Matview
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